Head of NSA and Cybercommand Is Ousted
83 comments
·April 4, 2025treetalker
jauntywundrkind
Astonishing.
Seth Cotlar put forward his "nuts, for now" theory, of utterly unbelievable craziest of crazy shit. Specifically calling out Loomer and Jack Posobiec as absolutely cracked individuals to have influence.
> Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec having massive influence over Trump's White House is a perfect illustration of my "nuts, for now" theory of GOP politics. If something seems "nuts" and hard to believe right now...just wait, because it's only "nuts, for now."
https://bsky.app/profile/sethcotlar.bsky.social/post/3llwulm...
Such deep sadness.
belter
But Mikeyyy still has a job...
"Mike Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal chats for national security work – report" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/trump-mike-w...
belter
If you're not familiar with the stratospheric level of derangement Laura Loomer operates on, let’s put it this way:
In a sane world, she'd be on a watchlist, not a guest list. Security protocols usually prevent people like her from getting within 1,000 feet of a U.S. President… or a school zone… or anything flammable... :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer
"...Loomer was banned from both Uber and Lyft in November 2017 after a day-long anti-Muslim tweetstorm, which included tweets about not being able to find a "non Muslim cab or @Uber @lyft driver". Twitter banned Loomer in November 2018 for violating its policies against hateful conduct. After the ban, she handcuffed herself to Twitter's headquarters in New York for two hours before police cut through the handcuffs at her request. In February 2019, Loomer was banned from PayPal, GoFundMe, and Venmo. In response, she said that "left wing terrorists and tech tyrants" were "trying to shut [her] down" and that she would "stop at nothing to make sure justice is served for the way Silicon Valley has disenfranchised me, falsely accusing me of being a white supremacist, a Nazi, anti-Muslim, a racist, a bigot, and every other smear in the book." Loomer was one of several right-wing activists banned by Facebook and Instagram in 2019 for using the platforms to post misinformation and extremism. In May 2021, she said she was banned from the social media app Clubhouse hours after joining..."
Animats
Here's NSA's own history of the confirmation process.[1] NSA director is a Senate-confirmed position. Trump can't just put someone into the job.
This document is from 2022, so it goes up to the NSA director appointed during Trump's first term, and discusses the politics. So far, the NSA director has always been a military general officer, but that's not a legal requirement.
The way it has worked in the past is that the uniformed services have recommended candidates for the job, and the Secretary of Defense and the President picked one. There's no history of anyone unqualified going into that job.
Worth reading.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Dec/01/2003123773/-1/-1/0/NSA...
TrackerFF
From a national security and intelligence perspective, this is awful.
You now have people like Loomer, that are seemingly fully occupied with sniffing out "hostiles" of Trump - which just translates to the people in the government that aren't 100% sucking up to him. It is like internal McCarthyism.
Imagine trying to run a functional government, when you have people like this running around.
e40
A disfunctional government is their goal. Nothing else makes any sense.
anigbrowl
Who's going to get those jobs, and how do you feel about them having access to all that data?
tempera
Let them have all the data and feed it to Grok so it can come up with good optimizations for the citizens of US and non-citizens alike!
Mr_Eri_Atlov
The knee-jerk reactions of the incompetent sycophants further hemorrhaging actual talent.
It's further indication that Donald Trump has descended into dementia plain and simple.
madethisnow
when did this place become /r/politics? This is a completely unserious claim
belter
> This is a completely unserious claim
throw0101c
For more on Loomer, perhaps see:
> The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/a...
Balgair
A shock-jock for the twitter age.
These people used to be consigned to the middle of your radio dial on the drive to and from work. Not the west wing.
bananapub
ahh, and flagged already!
in a previous age, say two months ago, it would be a career ending scandal for anyone senior to fire anyone based on what some fucking lunatic from Rumble said, but this is how eighty million Americans wanted the country run last year, and is how every single Republican politician wants it run now - if they didn't, they'd be speaking out and supporting impeachment.
hayst4ck
These is a timer to substantively act and it's soon coming up.
Right now the government is avoiding truly unpopular unjustifiable policy while it is purging the old government and placing loyalists into positions of power, something anyone would recognize as a coup if it happened in a foreign country.
The administration is mildly bound by law so long as they don't do anything to provoke into action those who took an oath to protect this country from enemies foreign and domestic and to act in service to the constitution... but once people in positions of enforcement are replaced by loyalists, the constitution truly becomes just a piece of paper. Laws and ideals are just words on paper. It is the enforcement mechanisms which turn those ideas represented on paper into something that interacts and molds physical reality.
belter
> It is the enforcement mechanisms which turn those ideas represented on paper into something that interacts and molds physical reality.
There’s a speech from Reagan, where he reflects on the constitutions of Soviet republics. He notes that, on paper, they all affirm human rights and the dignity of the individual. But in the end, it’s not the words that matter, it’s the people, and whether they choose to uphold or ignore those principles.
“I've read a number of constitutions of other countries, including that of the Soviet Union, and was astonished to find guarantee of freedom of expression and assembly and so forth in all of those. And you find yourself thinking, well, then, what makes ours so different? Why does ours work the way it does? And the answer is so simple that it almost escapes you. And yet it is so great that it explains the whole difference: three words -- 'We the People'.”
- Ronald Reagan - September 10, 1987 - Remarks to the Winners of the Bicentennial of the Constitution Essay Competition
hayst4ck
Ironic that he laid the foundation for the end of American constitutionalism and that so many of those who venerate him today are the same people who voted for this "soviet" like crisis we are experiencing now.
goatlover
But people here would rather flag these posts than recognize the threat.
kjreact
People on HN have too much to lose. Who is willing to put their personal wealth and livelihood at risk to protest? We are witnessing the fall of democracy and the middle class will stand aside and let it happen.
belter
The director of the NSA, who has an illustrious military and completely apolitical career of 30 years, has just been fired. According to those flagging, there is nothing here for curious minds to dissect :-)
watwut
They recognize it, they just dont see it as a threat. They want it to happen. It is a feature.
Their hope is that power abuses will go against left, democrats, trans, non conforming women and so on and so forth. And that no election ever will be able to change that anymore.
jauntywundrkind
And suppression of curiosity and engagement counts for infinity on HN, and all the interest in the world has no leverage, by the moderation system's rules.
croes
The bad (good) things is they replace these people by incompetent ones.
It give me The-Great-Leap vibes.
Escpecially RFK Jr.
tempera
I just heard RFK Jr. wants to focus on vaccine injured to find cures for that. That is so subversive to the vaccine industry.
Cures?
croes
He suggested infestation with bird flu which would kill 80% of the infected birds and creates the risk pf s new pandemic.
He employed the guy who faked the vaccines cause autism study to research vaccine safety.
He favors Vitamin A over vaccines for measles treatment.
Worked out great
goatlover
How does Laura Loomer have a say in who gets ousted?
TrackerFF
Trump learned from his last presidency, that there can be nothing but 100% unwavering loyalty to him and his vision. So Loomer and the likes of her are going through everyone, to sniff out those that aren't complete lackeys.
When they find someone, they go to Trump with a list and tell him that those are bad people that will only hinder him. Deep state operatives, undercover democrats, RINOs, etc.
Basically his own little group of Stasi-hobbyists.
rsynnott
Because the US is run by an idiot. Like, people are inclined to overanalyse this sort of thing, but at the end it comes down to the fact that Trump has _no idea_ what he is doing, and doesn't particularly care to learn.
senectus1
Trump suffers from a critical condition known as "Who-ever-spoke-to-him-last-itis"...
The ideas in his head are put there by other people... and when he feels ready to proclaim something the last person to speak to him is the one to put the idea into his head.
goatlover
Like Secretary Esteban Sorrento-Gillis for the first two and half seasons of the Expanse? Is Putin or Vance the equivalent of Undersecretary Errinwright? Musk would be Jules-Pierre Mao. The protomolecule can be AI, I guess.
belter
Told you. It was just news reporting...I can't put Trump as Marco Inaros because he is not as smart.
null
Loomered!
> In a statement, [Senator Mark Warren of Virginia] praised General Haugh’s leadership and said his removal would not make the country safer, jabbing at the White House for sharing sensitive material on a commercial messaging application and ousting members of the National Security Council staff at the urging of Ms. Loomer.
> Amid such actions, Mr. Warner said, the firing of a “nonpartisan, experienced leader” like General Haugh is “astonishing.”